A Wizard's Guide To Defensive Baking

Yeast is a living thing, and dough is magic—ask anyone who’s learnt to bake bread.

I love Bob. I love the gingerbread man who becomes more than just a trick.

I love Mona for who she is and who she becomes—and who she does not.

More from this world, please! Too much whimsey to enjoy here to spend it all on one novel.

This is my personal favorite of many excellent books by author “T. Kingfisher”, the pen name of Ursula Vernon. In the author’s own afterwords, it is “a weird little anti-establishment book with carnivorous sourdough and armies of dead horses.” This is entirely accurate, and should be fully sufficient to motivate readership on its own merits.

In addition, this is also-sort-of-allegedly a “young adult” fantasy novel, because the protagonist is a 14-year-old baker who uses excellent baking technique and just a bit of magic. She makes gingerbread men who dance, carefully tends the aforementioned carnivorous sourdough starter, and winds up defending her city against nefarious plots, a psychopathic wizard, and an army of cannibal mercenaries. Again, all of this should be fully sufficient, et cetera.

However, the reason this is my favorite of all the Kingfisher books is because it *isn’t* like other young adult fantasy novels in one key respect. The narrator is fully aware that there are other people in her world who are far better equipped to deal with the challenges she and her young, outnumbered, doughy, or unbalanced friends wind up facing. “It shouldn’t be up to a couple of kids and a madwoman on a bone horse to fix the mess,” as Mona laments. She’s right. And when the alternative is watching her world go up in flames, she still does the best she can, despite being completely outmaneuvered by some truly despicable and well-written villains.

For me, this book provides the kind of encouragement and inspiration that I very much appreciate when I am facing another day of attempting impossible things despite being woefully under-qualified and under-equipped for the task ahead. “A Wizard’s Guide” doesn’t pretend that this sort of thing is normal, fair, or in any way likely to succeed. But, much like that pesky thing called Real Life, the narrative does promise unexpected assistance, alliances, and delightfully bizarre reasons to laugh out loud even while the world is falling down around you. In Mona’s words, “you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a cookie look smug.” Reading about a smug-looking cookie is probably the next best thing. In conclusion, if you want to be encouraged to live fearlessly (or if you love a “young adult” aged eleven to one-hundred-and-eleven who might appreciate that encouragement), read and share this book!

Incredibly entertaining!!